sveinbjornt/hear

Command line interface for the built-in speech recognition and transcription capabilities in macOS.

What it solves

Apple's macOS includes powerful built-in speech recognition capabilities, but it does not provide a native command line interface (CLI) to access them. hear fills this gap by providing a robust CLI tool that allows users to transcribe audio directly from the terminal.

How it works

Written in Objective-C, hear acts as a interface for the macOS system speech recognition APIs. It can process audio from two primary sources: live microphone input or existing audio files. It supports all audio formats compatible with CoreAudio, including WAV, MP3, AIFF, AAC, CAF, and ALAC.

Who it’s for

macOS users who want to automate transcription tasks, integrate speech-to-text into terminal-based workflows, or transcribe audio files without using a GUI application.

Highlights

  • Dual Input Support: Transcribes both live microphone audio and pre-recorded audio files.
  • On-Device Processing: Includes a flag (-d) to force the use of on-device speech recognition, avoiding sending data to Apple servers and bypassing server-side character limits.
  • Broad Format Support: Works with any audio format supported by CoreAudio.
  • Native Integration: Built specifically for macOS to leverage system-level speech recognition.

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